UGA Alum Builds Atlanta-based Thryft Ship To Empower Instagram Resellers
Atlanta startup Thryft Ship helps Instagram resellers scale. They won a pitch competition at Fintech South and are now heading to Venture Atlanta.
When Valeria Brenner describes her startup's target customer, she doesn't speak in abstract demographics or market segments. Instead, she paints a vivid portrait of Lisa, a 28-year-old mom juggling two kids and a side hustle reselling thrifted clothes through Instagram. Lisa tracks orders with pen and paper until the chaos forces her into an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet to keep up with her growing reselling business.
Lisa represents a strong community of millions of entrepreneurs building businesses as independent sellers, which grows by billions of dollars annually. But these Instagram-based resellers face a common frustration: social media platforms help them find customers, but offer virtually no tools to actually run a business.
That’s where Brenner’s Thryft Ship comes in.
Thryft Ship provides resellers the inventory, order, and payment management tools needed to run a reseller business on Instagram. Instead of going back and forth in direct messages (DMs), a shop owner sends a buyer their Thryft Ship link to fill out with address and important shipping information. Then shop owners can use Thryft Ship to print discounted USPS labels and manage tracking.
The platform, which came out of beta and launched fully this January, has seen 10% month over month organic growth, Brenner told Hypepotamus. The platform is helping business owners ship out around 7000 packages every month.
While an early-stage startup, Brenner says that Thryft Ship has “baked-in virality” in its product, with new customers coming in as a mix of referrals and those who experience Thryft Ship online firsthand.
Building For Busy Side Hustlers
Brenner’s freshman year at the University of Georgia was cut short due to COVID. So when she came back to campus as a sophomore, she was eager to meet people. Someone recommended that she check out the Idea Accelerator, the on-campus program designed to help students validate a business concept.
She joined the accelerator with her current Instagram reselling business, a side gig she ran that sold thrifted clothes to her digital audience. She spent each week of the accelerator talking to customers — her current ones at first, and then other online business owners.
“I realized I had stumbled upon a pain point that I'd always resigned myself to just being the way that things had to be,” she said. That pain point? Just about everyone deals with issues around shipping and managing orders from their DMs.
Brenner continued to work on the platform part-time project during her college and graduate school years, seeing Thryft Ship sustain itself through her studies. While pursuing her masters degree in Marketing Research, Brenner submitted to and joined Techstars in the Bay Area, a program that Brenner credits with introducing her to important mentors and advocates for her business.
What's Next For Thryft Ship
Brenner found her way back to Atlanta to continue building Thryft Ship. And she’s wasted no time getting involved in the local startup ecosystem. Brenner recently took home the top prize of $25k in non-dilutive funding during the Fintech South Innovation Challenge.
Up next? Brenner is taking Thryft Ship to Venture Atlanta as one of the 86 companies selected for the venture capital conference taking place in October. Brenner said that she is ready to scale Thryft Ship and its early-stage team.
“We've got good momentum. We have a clear trajectory. We're building, and now it's a process of wanting to build much faster,” she added.
